I have just done a quick revision of the portion of the book chapter that I “junked” last week that deals with the development of the “transitional justice” field since 1945. And, as promised last week, I’ve now uploaded that text into the JWN archives.
This text is a part of my earlier plan for Chapter 11 of the “Violence and its Legacies” book. I appended to it, in the same file there, the latest version I have of the chart I’ve been compiling on truth commissions (which form only a part of the broader TJ field.)
I titled the text Notes on the development of ‘transitional justice’ since 1945.
In it, I make some important, preliminary arguments that the changes the field has already been undergoing, at the level of practice, in the past 10-15 years need to be made more explicit in the theory; and that the theory therefore, explicitly, needs to be made much broader and more holistic.
Some people have already started to reflect seriously on the need to broaden the definition and purview of the field, and the implications of making that shift. Luckily, some of them– Rama Mani, Bill Schabas, Gerald Gahima, etc– were at the UNU conference I went to last month. But I do think that more work needs to be done to make this shift more explicit.
I would really love to use this thread for comments and feedback.
Category: Transitional Justice
More on truth commissions
Jonathan and I are having a pretty interesting discussion down here on the topic of “what makes a ‘truth’ commission?” Stop on by, everybody, and share your views, too.
I’ve done a bit more work on the chart I’ve been compiling about the general phenomenon of truth commissions. Actually, while doing that, I’ve learned a lot more interesting things about the range of truth commissions that have operated around the world in the past 30 years.
For example, the t.c. established in Timor Leste (East Timor) in 2001 is titled the “Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor”. “Reception” there refers to receiving the perpetrators of (at least) small crimes back into their communities, in line with local cultural norms. Here is the Commission’s officially stated purpose.
I would love to learn more about the East Timor Commission’s whole process, which was apparently designed in line with national cultural norms there.
Their process was certainly designed to incorporate much more intentional reconciliation/ peacebuilding than the South African TRC. For example, former “perpetrators” of politically motivated acts of violence were expected to make a full confession (as at the SA TRC)– but then beyond that, a committee including local “elders” of the community would preside over a Community Reconciliation hearing which would come up with a “Community Reconciliation Act” (or acts) that this person would have to perform.
In SA, by contrast, the perps were not obligated to take part in any kind of a “reconciliation” process, or even to apologize or express remorse to their erstwhile victims. Production of a narrative that the Amnesty Committee considered to be fully truthful was enough to bring the perps full amnesty.
This little extract from the East Timor Commission’s “Update” for December 2003 and January 2004 gives a flavor of what was going on there:
Thinking about Rwanda with Harvey Weinstein
I don’t know how many of you recall the three posts (1, 2, and 3) I put up in mid-January in which I wrote about Eric Stover and Harvey Weinstein’s new book “My Neighbor, My Enemy; Justice and community in the aftermath of mass atrocity”?
Well, ain’t the world-wide web a wonderful thing? Sunday evening, I got a really interesting email from Harvey, in which he gently challenged a couple of things I’d said there.
(I had a similar experience not long ago when the Israeli researcher and writer Daniel Sobelman, whose work I mentioned when I posted here about Hizbullah, in December, likewise got in touch with me. There, without even a challenge. Yes, the WWW truly is remarkable.)
Anyway, back to Harvey M. Weinstein, who you might remember is a psychologist and a clinical professor in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. Okay, I can’t totally remember how much detail about his professional credentials I put into those earlier posts. But take it from me he’s one heck of a smart, well-informed, compassionate, and visionary guy.
His email gave me, as they say, “pause for considerable thought”. So I went back and re-read the chapter in the book that I’d voiced some criticism of in light of his comments to me, and got back to him. That was Chapter 10, an important chapter in which he and two co-researchers present the results of a 2,000-person attitudes survey that they had a big team conduct, in 2002, in a four significantly distinct kinds of locations around Rwanda.
I wrote my criticisms in the 2nd of those three posts linked to above.
Here is our correspondence this week:
Continue reading “Thinking about Rwanda with Harvey Weinstein”
UNU conference on Transitional Justice
Time was, there was a nearly wall-to-wall constituency among western human-rights
advocates and other liberals for the viewpoint that any country transitioning
into democracy or out of massiveoy violent conflict should be the subject
of war-crimes trials. That was back in the mid-1990s, after the UN Security
Council had successfully set up the ad-hoc international tribunals for former-Yugoslavia
(early 1993) and Rwanda (late 1994), and people in the international h.r.
movement were well on their way to achieving their goal of establishing a
permanent International Criminal Court.
I was an enthusiastic part of that constituency. (I’ve been an Amnesty
International member for– nearly– ever, and have sat on Human Rights Watch’s
Middle East advisory committee since 1992.) But starting in late 2000, I was
one of the first people in the h.r. movement to start to raise serious questions
about whether this passion for extensive war-crimes prosecutions actually
served the human rights and interests of peole in societies trying to recover from
violent conflict.
For some of my early writings on this topic, see
this
short June 2001 piece in the London-based magazine Prospect, or
this
longer piece on the Rwanda Tribunal and the Nuremberg precedent, that ran
in Boston Review in April/May 2002.
For quite a while there, I felt that my position was extremely lonely. After
all, in the US, when I started to question the wisdom of the pro- war crimes
courts position that put me in the company of folks like the Republican
Party anti-ICC forces and assorted isolationists, “Christian Nation” freaks,
and other Manifest Destiny cheerleaders in general.
And on the “other side”, cheering on the various war crimes courts and shouting
for ever more courts and more prosecutions, were most of the people I most
admire and affiliate myself with in the world. Oh well, I thought through
the issues again and again and again, and set about trying to build and test
the empirical basis for my position by pursuing my research on three conflict-terminating
countries in Africa that all adopted very different approaches to the atrocity-response
challenge.
I was delighted last fall when Ramesh Thakur, the Vice-Rector of the United
Nations University invited me to take make a presentation at a conference
that the UNU held this past week, in New York, on the theme of “The Rule of
Law and Transitional Justice: the Way Forward?” Also speaking there
were Ralph Zacklin, the Assistant UN Secretary-General for Legal Affairs;
Bill Schabas, a distinguished Canadian legal scholar who has published widely
on the law of genocide and war crimes and has helped set up a number of UN-backed
tribunals in recent years; Gerald Gahima, the former Attorney-General of Rwanda;
and various other luminaries in the field.
Delighted, but also quite a bit trepidatious. I had thought that my view
of the lack of utility–or even, on many occasions, the disutility– of war
crimes prosecutions as a way to help conflict-terminating societies address
the legacies of recently past atrocities would be very much the position of
an “outlier” in a room largely full of people dedicated to pushing forward
the prosecutions policy.
Well, maybe I should spend more time in New York. It turned out that
my views were not so much those of an outlier. The proceedings of the
discussion were generally off the record. But I was really happy to
learn how much some of the reservations that I had been expressing are also
now shared by people whom formerly I would have identified as being much
more strongly in the pro-prosecutions camp. These included both Schabas and
Gahima. At several points, conference participants made comments that
indicated that they really do “get” a number of points I have been making
repeatedly over the past four years, such as that:
- atrocity commission is in many cases very closely associated with
the incidence of bitter political conflict; therefore, an atrocity-suppression
strategy must include finding a sustainable and rights-respecting termination
of those conflicts - in the conflict-termination process it is the politics and diplomacy
of that process that is the key to its success; therefore, any “transitional
justice” or “rule of law” strategies adopted in those circumstances should
be subordinated to, and be a part of, that politics and diplomacy; such strategies
should always be pursued within a clear and pro-peacemaking political context - it is the residents of the conflict-torn territories themselves who
should be considered as the primary “stakeholders” or “constituency” for
any TJ/RL interventions; therefore, the desires and interests of other actors
in the international community should be subordinated to the needs of the
local-level stakeholders
But let me back up a little, and describe a couple of the most interesting
other things I got out of the conference…